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SteveThaiBinh

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Everything posted by SteveThaiBinh

  1. Keep Morrowind Tidy! Deposit your litter in the containers provided.
  2. Nope. First time through I want make sure I catch what everyone says, after that I want to be able to click through boring bits that I remember from last time. There are powerful and dramatic scenes that I don't click through, but then there are also shopkeepers and the beastkeeper on Onderon who bores me rigid. Quick scan of the subtitles - yup, I remember this - click.
  3. Hopefully after Kotor 3 they'll make each game stand-alone, or write a complete trilogy for 4-6 before they start making them. Coherent stories are a good thing. On the other hand, the more successful LucasArts' non-Kotor games are, the less likely it is that Kotor 3+ will ever be made, and they seem to be doing fairly well.
  4. My PC can break itself. Either that or it's the little elves again. Genuinely self-repairing robots and other machines shouldn't be that far off if nanotechnology takes off. I know it's been very hyped, but give it a couple of decades... Would HK-47 survive if he were shut down and jettisoned into space? Obviously he wouldn't rust - is there anything that would prevent him being perfectly preserved?
  5. It's possible that PC voters swung it. Who knows? Were any of the others available on PC? Longer, they say, but probably not much different otherwise. I heard mixed things about it, too and I would like have a go on a demo before I buy it, because it does look a bit action/console-y and the demo of Bards Tale put me right off. But then, what other RPGs are on the horizon?
  6. Yes, and no plans for a PC version. Fable for PC went gold today.
  7. For truly greta acting: Link. :D I watched Titanic in a cinema in Japan surrounded by 100+ teenage girls. When the Leonardo DiCaprio character fell off his raft and disappeared down into the depths, a hundred noses sniffled and a hundred voices moaned 'Leo! Leo!'. I wanted to laugh out loud, but knew that if I did, I might not make it out of the building alive. :ph34r:
  8. For a powerful soul you need a powerful soul gem. Do you have any Grand soul gems? They hold anything. Don't forget that there's a time limit on the soultrap spell. I don't think the game tells you when time's up, but you need to be quick. One thing I tried was to enchant a weapon with soultrap and use that for the killing blow - it worked quite well, even if the enchantment isn't very powerful. Of course, you need to have a soul to enchant it with. :D
  9. Still blue. Does anyone play with two sabers of different colours? That always looked wrong to me.
  10. I think he was hoping to have Iraq wrapped up by now and head into Iran for the 2008 election. Unfortunately he's a bit behind schedule. For the moment, it's probably best to focus on building up regional organisations like the African Union, the Arab League and ASEAN. The world is too big to be manageable, and as critical as I am of US policies, I have my doubts about anyone else doing much better. It's frustrating that other African nations refuse to do anything about Mugabe, and I think the Zimbabwean opposition will ultimately hold them to account for it. But if the US wants to disengage from its role as world policeman, this is the best long-term prospect. Regional organisations are not the UN itself, but have a formal place within the UN system, so both pro- and anti-UN people should be able to support them. Our Lord John Cleese? I believe he does a lot of management training videos. :ph34r:
  11. It's quite a common reaction. It's precisely because the rest of the game is so good that you feel so bad when the ending flops. If the whole game had been mediocre, I'd just have stuck it up on the shelf and moved on to something else. The feeling of disappointment lessens when you start playing again, because you're immersed in the strong portion of the game and finding new things you missed the first time. I agree, though obviously Obsidian were never going to satisfy everyone, nor should they try. This annoys me, too, though it has its defenders. In the case of Atris it makes sense, because she's so full of herself you could probably start juggling grenades and she wouldn't notice. Sometimes it allows you to express yourself in a different way, enhancing roleplaying opportunities, but more often it's just changing the words to create an illusion of choice that doesn't really exist. I don't think so - it's more likely to be lack of influence, as others have said above. First time through it's quite easy to lose influence a couple of times and not think much of it, especially when Visas joins. Rushed ending. Have you read the cut content threads or the information about the Restoration Project? There are scenes with Handmaiden on Malachor which should get restored. It's a major design flaw for all the characters that the act of Jedification is essentially the end of their development in the game, rather than a mid-way point before the student-teacher phase begins. It is very strange that Obsidian can work so hard to create characters that you care about and yet not see in advance that this would be a common reaction. I'm less inclined to attribute this to haste - more of a genuine mistake. I think Obsidian appreciate honest and detailed feedback like this, though in public they can't do more than defend their product. There is a magazine article floating around the forums in which they discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the game, but they don't exactly focus on the storytelling weaknesses. It might be that it's a little too close to home for them to open up about it - stories are supposed to be their great strength, after all.
  12. The most recent UN report on peacekeeping shows the largest contributors of troops to be Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, with the UK and US coming in at 29th and 30th respectively. I'm surprised - I thought we had a lot of troops in Cyprus, but either it's fewer than I thought or they're counted separately.
  13. I wouldn't do the peaceful thing a second time, and I wouldn't really advise anyone else to bother, either. What I missed most was not being able to kill . Problem in finding enough evil things to do? There's an 'evil walkthrough' on the web somewhere that gives pointers. If we ever get real AI, we can ask them.
  14. You can persuade him to commit suicide, but arguably that is killing him.
  15. It's not canon, at least not yet. Check one of Ghost of Anakin's earlier posts, it has a link to a comment by the Lucas Empire's canon-keeper that he was 'pushing' for the LS female Exile to become canon, but it hadn't been decided.
  16. I've completed Arcanum without killing any intelligent creature. Go on, tell me you're surprised. The most annoying part is avoiding random encounters with the Molochean Hand and Orc Bandits. You have to save and reload a lot. Of course, you have to kill someone in the final battle, but I think that was it.
  17. Of all the possible permutations and combinations of outcomes of Kotor 1, some have I think been 'pruned' for inconsistency and to keep the numbers down. For example, I think it's technically possible to save Bastila on the Star Forge if Revan is LSF (light-side female). However, it makes less sense than the 'romantic/I can save you because I love you' of the LSM Revan, so it's assumed that if Revan is LSF, Bastila is dead. By the same policy, it's possible to kill Juhani and then proceed to the LS ending, but this permutation deserves to be pruned as well. If Revan is LS, Juhani survives.
  18. If the situation escalates? You mean if the students look like they might be getting public support? Or if there's an 'incident'? The British police are very good at manufacturing 'incidents' that force them to break up peaceful demonstrations violently. It's not possible to use nuclear weapons without killing civilians - that's the nature of the weapon. If Mr. Bush announced to the world that he was changing policy so that the US would never use nuclear weapons unless such weapons were used on it, or there was evidence that such an attack was imminent (notice I said evidence, not intelligence) I would give credit where credit was due.
  19. I don't think the game says so. It does say that lots of Jedi died on Katarr, so if the Kotor 3 writers want this, it's perfectly consistent with what's been said. On the other hand, with Bastila reappearing and the Jedi Masters not knowing about Atris or Kreia, it's possible that Juhani was just hiding and could reappear. It would be a mistake to bring her back, certainly as a follower - she's not really a much-loved character. Kotor 2 might have erred on the side of bringing too much from Kotor 1 (Vrook :angry: ) without doing what people really wanted, which was to continue the story and the Revan-Bastila/Carth romances. :D
  20. I'm sure what you say is accurate about how the law exists on paper. I've heard it said that Iran has the most liberal and tolerant constitution in the world. It's not an irrelevant point - it means that when a pro-democracy movement begins, as in Iran, people can claim it is not importing a foreign idea (democracy) from the West, merely putting into practice the country's own constitution. However, power still lies in the hands of the tyrants, so that as in Iran, the hardliners can subvert the rules by banning 'unsuitable' candidates from elections and disenfranchising opposition voters. While most students in today's China are fairly apathetic about politics and more focused on materialism (or so I've heard) I'm sure there are enough pro-democracy 'radicals' to stage another Tiananmen Square protest. You really don't think today's leaders would send in the tanks? There's nothing wrong or immoral about having a trade surplus. It just means that China is producing more goods that the West wants than vice-versa. Neither the US nor the EU has the right to preach about free trade given their disgraceful subsidies to agriculture which keep the developing world in poverty. That's important and a necessary contribution to peace and stability. Unfortunately, the US has (to my knowledge) not agreed a no first strike policy for its nuclear weapons. I don't understand the reason for that at all - perhaps someone could enlighten me? Do the UK, France or Russia have a similar policy? I think discussions of Chinese-US relations and China's place in the world is a reasonable thread evolution, given the potential nuclear implications if relations go disastrously wrong.
  21. Revan and Malak were already evil before they discovered the Star Forge, because in the cut-scene on Dantooine when they find the Star Maps: 1) Revan was already wearing black and covering his/her face. 2) Malak already had a scary voice. Star Wars is space opera/pantomime, and you have to take it on those terms.
  22. Depending on what they're planning to do, but I would have thought that Special Operations was one area where quality clearly trumped quantity. And the US does have the advantage that its military gets a lot of practice. One of Bush's biggest ever blunders (before we knew enough about him to started hating him - gosh, it seems so long ago now) was in his election campaign in 2000 when he called China a 'strategic competitor', rather than a partner. Arguably true, of course, but insane diplomacy - what Bush likes to think he excels at is straight talking, and what you need with China is skillful diplomacy. Especially over Taiwan, where you need to tread so gingerly around its status - not a country, part of China yet not actually part of China, and so on. I'm not at all a fan of the Chinese government. Over some issues (like Taiwan, or the US spy plane that got shot down) their public pronouncements are excessive to the point of resembling the tone of a petulant teenager. So long as there's one adult in the room, things are unlikely to escalate, and until recently you could rely on the US to be that adult. Not sure now, though.
  23. I remember it. :D It was full of things like 'Well, Revan may have started a war which caused the deaths of millions and the devastation of the Republic's military, but he was doing it to make the Republic stronger so he was actually a really good person'. This is not a view I share.
  24. I can see the US military keeping China out of a neighbouring country such as India or Nepal, I can even see them occupying a very small portion of Chinese territory, but the idea that they could take and hold Beijing and the country as a whole is laughable. We've seen the limitations of a technologically-superior small conventional army in Iraq. Even tyrants have to keep an eye on public opinion - in a sense it's more important for them, because without freedom of expression to release the pressure, it just builds and builds until there's an explosion. They are. Since it's highly unlikely that a US-China war would be fought in the vicinity of the mainland US, it would be in or near Chinese territory. Mao wouldn't have cared in the least about slaughtering a few million of his own people to win a war, but I don't think the current government could afford it. China has to be the only significant (non-nuclear, non-terrorist) military threat to the US, so it's understandable if the US military uses them as a sort of yardstick in their own military planning. However, the danger is that the military planners get into the habit of thinking of China as 'the next enemy', and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  25. We do have a spoilers forum, you know. There are a couple of things you wrote that I'd like to comment upon, but until you or the moderators move this to the spoilers forum, I shall refrain.
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